The Internet used to have laughably low speed as well. Are you old enough to have used a dial-up modem?
You are right that 4 tx/s is too low in the long-run. But people are innovating: DAG networks like Nano, BTC's Lightning Network, Ethereum's Plasma and sharding, etc.
Maybe those ideas will work, maybe they won't, but very smart people like Vitalik believe they will work, and they are putting serious time and effort into them. Happily, Lightning Network, sharding and other proposals are making serious pushes forward this year as a top priority, so we don't need to argue -- we'll soon see how well these upgrades work in practice.
I had a series of dial-up modems for many, many years. It was always good enough because it's not like we were watching Netflix on them.
Bitcoin is not good enough. Compare to alternatives that aren't cryptocurrency and it's just straight garbage. Saying that people are innovating is a pointless tautology, that's always true and doesn't change the fact that right now it is absolute garbage.
(I trade bitcoin futures. I don't in any way believe in or care for the tech, I'm just here to make money.)
False. You're referring to an adversarial situation where your payment channel counterparty tries to close the channel using an old state that gives them more of the money in the channel than they should own. The duration during which you can then post a breach remedy transaction to deprive them of ALL the channel value is configurable when you update the channel state, but the default is 1 week. Eventually the expectation is that you'll even be able to outsource this operation to third parties to monitor the blockchain on your behalf and post the breach remedy transaction if needed.
If I don't trust one person, I'm supposed to instead trust a tertiary entity to act in my best interests? What motivation could this third party have other than to simply make money?
It seems as though the lightning network is being marketed as a solution, but I don't understand how it isn't simply creating an even bigger problem by stripping me of any/all control.
You are right that 4 tx/s is too low in the long-run. But people are innovating: DAG networks like Nano, BTC's Lightning Network, Ethereum's Plasma and sharding, etc.
Maybe those ideas will work, maybe they won't, but very smart people like Vitalik believe they will work, and they are putting serious time and effort into them. Happily, Lightning Network, sharding and other proposals are making serious pushes forward this year as a top priority, so we don't need to argue -- we'll soon see how well these upgrades work in practice.